Eddy on preventing water damage in multifamily and commercial buildings

Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining today.

We're gonna be going over our presentation. Let me just get everything set up here.

Alright. So today's presentation will be strategies for leak detection in commercial and multifamily properties.

We'll be going through a quick intro on myself and the company into the presentation, about thirty minutes. And we'll leave a few minutes for q and a. If anybody has questions, you can fire it off in the chat.

Otherwise, we'll get started.

So introducing myself, my name is Adam Baartman, CEO at Eddy Solutions.

I'm a second generation plumber and spent about twenty years owning, operating a plumbing and mechanical company. We worked for a lot of the leading property management companies, such as Dell Management, ICC, Achilles, Park Property, Crossbridge, FirstService, etcetera.

And out of that, we had a lot of clients with repetitive plumbing issues or typical plumbing issues.

And so we had founded a company called Reed Controls many years ago that was acquired by Eddy Solutions in twenty twenty one, but have spent basically the last ten years in the leak detection technology industry.

So very quick, video clip here that I think will just give a crash course on what we're looking at today.

When it comes to water leaks, early detection is critical.

Within seconds of detecting an anomaly, Eddy sends out email, SMS, and dashboard alerts.

But we don't stop there. A trained twenty four seven monitoring center is at the core of what we do to support our clients.

When an alert is triggered, we follow-up immediately.

Hello. This is Rachel from Eddy Solutions. We have received an alert from a water sensor located in the mechanical room on the twenty second floor behind the air unit.

K. Yeah. I'm just running up the stairs right now. I saw the email come through.

Hi. It's calling from I'm up here on twenty three. Is there any way that you can shut the water off water off? Yeah. Or twenty two, I mean.

Okay. Sure. I can shut off the water for you. Do you know what caused the leak?

It's coming out of the backwash station.

The pressure is slowly decreasing now.

Okay. We've got less, pressure now pressure now.

We still have slower, just less now.

The water stopped? The water stopped.

Hang on one second. Yeah. The water stopped. The water stopped. Perfect. Thank you.

At Eddy Solutions, we go beyond technology. With twenty four seven monitoring and real time assistance, we ensure that alerts don't turn into costly disasters.

Alright. Perfect. Thanks for playing that. So that that was really intended to, while I have, your full attention to really showcase Eddy's value, how we engage, and, hopefully, relate to some of the audience here.

If you're in that property management world, you probably have experienced this on at least a number of occasions. And it can be very chaotic in having that additional support in the background to warn you early about where the issue is, tell you specifically where it is. And then the best part is support our clients with the actual shutdown of water could be extremely helpful in these chaotic events. But now getting into more of the details, and we'll just sort of zoom out for a moment.

So when we look at the purpose of everything that we're doing, how are properties affected by leaks? And so when I think of the word leak, there's really two types of leaks.

The first might be more intuitive. We're talking floods and water escape. So these are leaks caused by pipe bursts, maybe kitchen stack, drain overflows, or bathroom drain overflows, waterproofing issues, floor to floor leaks from shower enclosures, etcetera.

Ultimately, that's the physical presence of water where it should not be versus water waste, which sometimes people refer to as leaks as well. But this is leaks caused by malfunctioning systems or equipment or fixtures, leaky toilets, irrigation systems that maybe are running or leaking below grade. Essentially, water flowing through a system into a drain or a runoff that you can't see and wasting water, when it shouldn't be.

So when you look at water leaks, of course, they affect everybody from property managers to supers to residents to the HOA.

All stakeholders, are affected, and so leaks cause resident disruption or potential displacement if it's catastrophic enough. It'll cause property managers to lose a lot of time working on resolving these issues. And, a lot of managers are restricted to the amount of hours they can actually spend, maintaining a property, especially if it's smaller and you're not really there full time. It can also cause insurance premiums and deductibles to be at risk. It can cause challenge distinguishing between whether it's the corporation or the residence, piping, or infrastructure.

A lot of finger pointing can occur there. And lastly, a potential impact to the relationship between the corporation or the homeowners association and the actual management company.

A building that's experiencing a very frequent amount of leaks, whether they're right or wrong, the HOA may point to the management company and say, what are we doing about this? We need, resolution.

And so that's where a leak detection system will come in. That can proactively improve the property.

And so leak detection systems create, resolving all of the problems we just saw, reduced impact on residents with early detection and warnings, less time wasted on major multiunit catastrophes, mitigating risk to the insurance premiums and deductibles, and even, improvements by saving money on those.

A clear pinpointed data driven indication into the source of the location of the leak. So, of course, if a sensor determines that there's a leak or a flow device, advising that there's a leak, It'll give you very specific information as to when it occurred and where it occurred to reduce the finger pointing.

And lastly, better operational and financial performance, which, of course, everybody managing a property will be measured by, which will ultimately improve the relationship between the HOA and the management company. Now we're looking at high water usage type leaks that, of course, also affects everybody. When equipment malfunctions, water waste can create a major impact to the financial performance of the property for the most part. And so water runoff causes high water bills, which is traditionally when people pick up on the issue. you get a bill at the end of the quarter or maybe even the end of the year, and it's significantly higher than it was, on a respective period prior. You can have damage to equipment or structure. We've seen slow water leaks degrade concrete, create potholes, or just generally rust up equipment and other infrastructure.

And lastly, because of those high water bills, it would unfairly increase the maintenance fees. And when I say unfairly, the, malfunctioning piece of equipment will obviously impact someone, but there could also be a particular user or resident or commercial space as part of the greater structure that's the primary consumer of water, and everybody else has to sort of foot the bill even though it's not directly responsible to them. And so water monitoring systems will proactively improve visibility. When metering infrastructure is implemented, the overall transparency and visibility on how water is being used in the premises improve.

And so to resolve those issues we've pointed out, metering systems will create protected billing surcharges by alerting the users at the moment there's irregular usage, so you're not waiting for that giant water bill. You'll get alerts on continuous flow conditions, which will protect equipment or the structure. Again, if there's slow leaks, you'll be alerted to them. And lastly, mitigating and maintaining the maintenance fees because you won't have those sudden charges or major damage to infrastructure that now has to be repaired.

And so just as a recap, whether the property is looking to protect against water damage caused by water leaks or better manage water usage through the property, there's very easily implemented solutions to support both of those efforts, which, of course, we'll get into. And when we think of them separately, we'll implement leak detection systems that are made up of sensors and shutoff valves in order to mitigate those water damage type leaks or meters that'll provide wireless consumption data and flow monitoring again to alert users ahead of time.

Lastly, for buildings that have actually implemented this, so we've pulled two, of the properties, that were more recent. And so the details here were the two existing properties. These were, a retrofit implementation.

It was not a new construction deployment.

They had designed with us the implementation of sensors in the suites in various areas like kitchens, on the HVAC appliances in bathrooms, etcetera, with a few key shutoff valves. The overall value of the equipment was about a hundred thousand dollars. And now outside of the actual savings born by receiving those alerts and shutting off water and sort of the day to day, services that we provide, we received feedback from both the separate condo corporations.

One of them had saved twenty five percent off their premiums without affecting any of the deductible, and the other property had reduced their deductible from a quarter million to fifty thousand dollars without affecting the premium. And so we see it on both sides, a significant savings. That was all accomplished within twelve months of deploying the equipment.

So, of course, an extremely fast return on their investment.

And so diving deeper into Eddy as a business first, we work with essentially all leading developers throughout Canada and the US, for such as Tridel, Daniels, Fitzrovia, UCLA College, Menke, CenterCourt, Achilles, Crossbridge, now FirstService, Bentall, GreenOak. The list goes on. So we've had a lot of successful deployments, a lot of great referrals, great experiences.

But we also work with some other industry leaders, such as the leading metering companies in Canada, Karma, Wise, PowerStream, and Meturgy, as well as many of the insurance carriers, which is Northbridge, Aon, AXA, etcetera.

And so that'll help oftentimes, provide better incentives. We can have those conversations with insurance companies. We can support our clients with data to take to the insurance companies and the brokers working with you to drive down the insurance costs year over year. To date, we have over a hundred thousand devices in the field, well over a hundred properties under protection, and an estimated thirty million dollars in year to date water damage savings.

The markets that we really spend most of our attention on would be multifamily or multi unit industrial, commercial buildings, institutional and hospitality. Of course, it's not limited to those, but multifamily makes up a significant portion of our portfolio, for those that might be, aware of these projects. So Tridel had put up a beautiful development, called The Well, which was made up of several towers. We had an, implementation on three of them.

Four Seasons Residences, both in Toronto and now in Florida, will have deployments there. And then Fitzrovia, which is more of a rental purpose built rental developer, all of their properties, on the new construction site. So now a layer deeper into the actual technology. We have a very slick and simple lineup of equipment depending on what we're trying to accomplish and what goals we're trying to solve for our clients. So when it comes to metering products, particularly submetering, we would implement the Eddy IQ, which is an all in one valve meter and technology coming in three quarter inch and one inch pipe sizes. So those could be implemented on certain irrigation systems, smaller water mains, or at, like I mentioned, at the suite level, typically not in a retrofit application, but in any new construction application.

Now when we need to have metering or valve beyond one inch in pipe size, we would take the Eddy Link and connect those to third party valves and meters.

It allows us to have the same features and functions. So the metering and the valving to give us the control and insight and data into consumption, but it would be sort of a parts explosion with the link and then a valve and or meter depending on the application.

The most used product by far for us and the one I'll probably focus on more on this presentation would be the Eddy H2O. It's a puck style sensor.

It's extremely small. It has a great form factor. It's about the size of an Apple AirPods charging case, and that has a five to seven year battery life. You would place it again in high risk areas, either mounted or free floating, and that would provide alerts to users at the source of the leak. It also, provides data around temperature and humidity, which allows us to use additional data to make decisions around alerting. In different use cases, there are other variations of sensors.

They functionally all work the same as far as how they pick up leaks and report out. But you can see here in small, there would be a probe style sensor or a rope style sensor. Again, just different use cases. Now all of those endpoints will speak to the Eddy gateway.

The gateways and all of the endpoints communicate to each other using a frequency called LoRaWAN.

That's a, I'll say, globally adopted wireless frequency.

And what that would mean for our clients is not only can the Eddy devices speak to the gateway, they work extremely well in concrete environments, which is really the idea behind LoRaWAN. So, regardless that it's a sixty story building with lots of concrete and rebar and doors and obstructions, The communication will be extremely strong without requiring too many gateways. Typically, we're doing one every few floors, maybe every three or four stories.

But it also allows our clients to go out into the market. And if they were to find, for example, an indoor air quality sensor or a parcel management system, many of those pieces of equipment also use LoRaWAN wireless technology. And so you could essentially invest in Eddy gateways vertically through the building for the purposes of leak detection, but now open the doors to all kinds of other use cases from other vendors. As far as Eddy, we're focused strictly on water, but that is a huge value out of having the LoRaWAN Eddy gateways that are non proprietary.

So getting a layer deeper into the products, again, the Eddy IQ is a three quarter or one inch revenue grade all brass design, meter, that comes with an integrated ball valve.

When we need to do metering beyond that one inch pipe size, we can tap into existing meters, using the Eddy Link. So for example, if you have some commercial submeters or check meters that you're having to manually read on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis, you could connect simply a link to that existing meter and obtain that data in real time to go ahead with any sort of, billing or consumption.

Now when it comes to the sensors, again, the three in one Eddy H2O, temperature humidity in the presence of water with that seven year battery life.

But we also have the probes and ropes and temperature and pressure sensors if the use case applies.

And lastly, using the same link, if you are just strictly looking for shutoff valves, we can go really from any size that's required.

Typically, half to two inch valves are ball valves that you see on the right side. Anything two and a half inch and greater would traditionally be butterfly valves or flange valves. And then we're also able to tap into a lot of third party valves. So if you have which you unlikely would on a domestic system, but any kinda actuated valves, those would wire into the link to give you that control.

Now there's two types of triggers.

We've talked about flow based alerts and the actual presence of water. Those would be detected differently whether we're using the sensor or the flow meter.

So for an example, a flow based alert, you'd have water traveling through a pipe. Our meter is registering what the flow is on a regular basis. It has onboard machine learning to understand what is regular versus irregular.

And so if you had a continuous flow scenario, perhaps a toilet flapper that's malfunctioned, and you have a very slow leak that's creeping into the tank, invisible to the naked eye, nobody knows about it.

The IQ is going to tell you that something is running continuously, and, it's worth investigation versus extreme flow, which would be another scenario, perhaps a sudden pipe burst.

Then again, it's looking onboard to all the historical data. We've never seen that kind of flow before. We're going to send you alert. Now you have to be very careful about how you use meters for leak detection.

First of all, it's more about water conservation.

It's it's fairly unlikely that you're gonna have that pipe burst and the meter reacting that quickly. We'd often recommend just the sensor when you're thinking more about flood detection.

But also using the meter on, say, the main incoming water supply to the building, there would be too much data if, let's say, we had a twenty story apartment building or condo building, and we were metering at the main.

We might even be able to tell you that there is irregular flow. In the best case scenario, the challenge is the device can't tell you where in this twenty story building the continuous flow or extreme flow is coming from. So, again, you just have to be careful about where and how metering products are deployed. Pretty much the more specific down the line of the water distribution that you get, the better that information becomes. So implementing it at a unit level on a particular system.

We've seen buildings with water features or pools that have an auto refill, and that is more predictable. That is specific enough for a meter to be able to tell somebody, not only for it to be able to figure out that there's a problem, but provide useful information, useful alerts that somebody can actually react to as opposed to it being a nuisance. And so the way the meter works is it's tracking consumption over time and looking for continuous flow or extreme flow scenarios and providing those alerts. Now, again, all of those products will communicate wirelessly to the Eddy gateways.

In very tall properties, you often lose cell reception as you go up because these devices are cell enabled. But, again, in taller infrastructure, you would probably want to wire them all together to a dedicated hardwired Internet source at the building, and that would give you much better outside world communication.

As far as the inside world communication from device to gateway within the building, we typically need one every other floor, every third floor, and we'll stack those through common electrical rooms or telecommunication closets. So, again, makes it very easy to implement, not destructive, very low disruption, especially to residents. And so when you pair that with the wireless sensors, essentially, you could deploy an entire existing building within a matter of a week or two, depending on how much equipment was purchased with little to no disruption to residents.

Now another way to look at the communication. So, again, all of our endpoints, meters, valves, links, sensors, etcetera, communicate to the gateways wirelessly.

The gateways, whether they're hard lined Internet or cellular, will speak to the outside world that hits the Eddy servers and splits from there. So, of course, we have our own dashboard. We have our call centers you saw in the video before. You could get all kinds of data information alerts, etcetera.

Most people are receiving alerts via SMS and email and then followed up by a call from our call center to a list of people that you would give us. For more sophisticated clients, if they have smart building systems or sort of that single interface for all of the smart technology in their building, we have an extremely well developed API, and you can push or pull from that to have all of that information on a single pane view. And we can also do different kinds of file sharing, automated file sharing through FTP.

Lastly, if you're managing a property that is widespread, it's not a high rise, maybe it's a bunch of industrial buildings, We could take advantage of the outdoor Eddy Gateway, which has extremely long range signal strength. And so, in this deployment, we had four industrial properties where we were applying sub meters or check meters for them to more efficiently do their billing. And we implemented a couple outdoor gateways on-site two and four, and that captured everything in this general area from within the suite. So extremely, low cost, easy to deploy arrangement to give us that full connectivity. And, of course, as I mentioned with the LoRaWAN gateways, this client can now add any other type of sensors, occupancy, door open, whatever they can think of, along that same infrastructure.

Now the key talking point for us when we're looking at existing buildings is we know and we are confident that we can save you money on your insurance and protect protect deductibles and reduce the overall headache of water leaks. And so it was very nice to see Aon, which is, of course, a extremely large insurance carrier, go through a very comprehensive study.

So they they put together this white paper, the effectiveness of water leak detection devices in commercial real estate operations.

So what they understood at the time was that water damage claims constituted forty seven percent of all insurance claims across the property. And so they wanted to conduct a study to understand the benefits of leak detection and early prevention in commercial buildings using the sensors to provide the alerts, which would reduce the impact time from hours to minutes. And so zooming in on their data before the study, again, forty seven percent of all claims in buildings were water related. And so I'm sure managers and residents and anybody that's ever lived or operated in a building would understand that. They're they're all too prevalent, and it's really not if, but when you have a leak and, the severity of that situation. And so a bit on the study. So a methodology in studying the effectiveness of water leak detection systems' ability to mitigate water damage claims revolved around performing an in-depth analysis of Canadian Real Estate Corporation's portfolio.

The portfolio included multifamily residential, office, retail, industrial properties, and accompanying an overall water damage insurance claims history for the past five years. Two things they wanted to figure out was determine if leak detection systems or water flow management devices would be applicable in affecting each individual water claim, and then estimate to what extent each of those devices would have reduced the damages incurred.

So their findings after analyzing the selected real estate corporation's total claims history over the five year period, they identified a total of two hundred and forty three water damage claims to be examined as part of the study, and it was found that fifty eight percent of the water damage claims could have been positively affected by using water leak detection.

So that was quite significant.

Other items that they found in part of the outcome, so Aon study found that twenty three percent of the total water damage amounts incurred could have been successfully mitigated.

The two hundred and forty three total water damage claims amounted to fourteen and a half million in losses, and the study found that four point eight million of that amount could have been positively affected by implementing these water protection systems. So it's quite significant. We're happy to share this, public white paper. And so, of course, reach out to us if you wanna dive deeper. It's about ten pages and extremely, interesting to see, a third party analysis of how sensors can really improve a property's experience. Now as far as deploying Eddy, again, our focus is always start simple, start with sensors.

We always recommend considering sensors in the suites, whether it's in wall cavities, at HVAC appliances, or any high risk appliance, dishwashers, washing machines, etcetera.

Even simpler, sensors in common areas, amenities, change rooms, and mechanical rooms.

And then my favorite would be a main shutoff valve at the point of entry from the street. So, we often joke that's the panic button. If everything's going horrifically wrong, and there's some major sudden catastrophic event from anywhere in the world, from our call center, from the apps, you could shut down water to the building and then have somebody come out. And that's a very easy to implement, fixture as part of the infrastructure is typically in a basement, in a meter room. So there's no, opening walls or anything like that.

Bird's eye view of a typical condo or apartment suite. The areas that we would always recommend first are things like the kitchen sink, which targets both the sink and the dishwasher if applicable.

In this case, they have the laundry and a hot water tank. Depending on the type of construction, you may not have the hot water tank. It would just be a laundry closet. But we all know that appliances are not built like they used to be, and so are often the causes of major leaks, burst hoses for, washing machines or drain overflows and stack backups in the kitchen.

Other places might be at the risers that pass through the suites. Typically, those are behind vanity or bathroom sinks. And then if there are any exterior wall, HVAC appliances, fan coils, heat pumps, if they're in the ceiling or on the exterior wall, most condos will experience condensate drain backups or coil leaks or expansion joint leaks. And so those would help you, determine when there's a leak ahead of time. Of course, you could also add sensors in the bathroom.

You have to be careful about those. They must be installed in, I'd say, out of sight, out of mind locations.

What you don't want are false positives from people taking, maybe too excessive of showers, but, bathrooms can get a bit wet, or just general cleaning.

So they're a great placement for sensor, but you just have to be careful about how they're deployed. Now as far as Eddy and our services, we'll be able to handle everything for you from start to finish, and we give the optionality.

These are very easy to deploy devices.

If the building has a building engineer or a competent, team that they feel comfortable installing, it's as simple as receiving the sensor and placing it in the area that we would design. So before we do anything, we'd come together with our client, their building drawings, mark everything up, and decide what is the actual solution design, when it comes to the placement of sensors, so therefore quantities, locations of gateways, etcetera.

If there's any valves or meters to be installed, we would coordinate with your preferred trades. Of course, most buildings are gonna have a plumber or electrician that they work with. And so we're there to use the drawings that are now created and all of the engineering details, scope of works, and specification sections. We'll coordinate with them, make sure everything gets installed as per those drawings.

We'll coordinate with any other trade or, like I said, building personnel to place the actual sensors down.

Then our team will provide an extremely thorough training and onboarding session. That could be typically with a group from the building, whether it's the super security, property managers, off-site managers, whatever is required. We could do it multiple times. They go through a thorough dashboard training, business rules, and automation set up, make sure we have the right call list, and that everybody understands how the system was implemented and how to maintain it on an ongoing basis. And then we would provide any of the monitoring either during construction, if this was a new development, or just for the operating building on an ongoing basis.

So that gives a bit of a introduction.

It's, hard to give all the information in one shot on these short presentations.

But, of course, if anybody has additional questions, has interest in the Aon white paper, or ultimately are interested in saving money on their insurance, of course, we can certainly help begin the discovery and conversations there. You can reach out to myself, or Elliot, who's our, EVP of sales and technology, for any other questions.

We had one question that I saw come in. Can the Eddy IQ be used for metering and sending bills to the occupant? Absolutely.

So, again, as I mentioned, our Eddy IQ is a revenue grade meter.

It uses an odometer, so it's taking actual consumption, not just flow rates or a pulse output. It's a it's a very accurate, depiction of what's being used. We do that very often. Now Eddy does not provide a billing service, but we can provide the data for those that provide that service.

If it's a smaller building where you're self managing, any of the utilities and separating those evenly, we could provide the data to you via reports. Or if you actually work with a sub metering partner, we would provide them the data or connect via API, and then they would provide that service of billing and collections.

So I think that's all the questions we got. As I mentioned, you can reach out to us at any time.

Happy to answer any other questions, and look forward to the next webinar. We host these every month, typically on the third week of each month. Thank you very much, everybody. Have a great day.